The Little Drummer Girl, TVNZ On Demand

Maybe you think this isn’t really your thing: a TV adaptation of an old John le Carre´ novel, written and set over 30 years ago, with a complex plot involving Israeli spies and Palestinian revolutionaries. That’s understandable, but it also couldn’t be more wrong. Everybody needs to go to TVNZ On Demand and watch The Little Drummer

Girl immediately.

The six-episode mini series is currently two episodes in — they stream here the same day they air on the BBC — and is on its way to being one of the best new shows of the year. Made by the same team as 2016’s acclaimed The Night

Manager and directed by legendary South Korean filmmaker Park Chanwook ( The Handmaiden, Oldboy), it pulls you in with a brilliantly shot opening set piece and keeps you immersed with a perfectly-paced plot. The cast is full of standout performances, none more so than Michael Shannon as le Carre´’s unconventional Israeli spymaster Martin Kurtz, whose elaborate plan to bring down a cell of Palestinian bombers gets the ball rolling. Ordinarily, it seems, they would just try and blow them all up, but his idea is more fun — endangering a whole cast of actors and double agents to bring down their network from within.

His main target in this respect is an outspokenly pro-Palestinian young actress from London, Charmian ‘Charlie’ Ross (Florence Pugh). Kurtz’s plan involves offering her entire theatre troupe a gig in Greece, where they lie around on the beach just long enough for Charlie to be seduced by an international man of mystery played by a smouldering Alexander Skarsgard.

From the suburbs of Munich, to the beaches of Naxos and streets of Athens, it’s a journey full of tension and intrigue.